Detroit Rock & Roll by Ben Edmonds for Our Purposes, The
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"KICK OUT THE JAMS!" Detroit Rock & Roll by Ben Edmonds For our purposes, the story of Detroit rock & roll begins on September 3, 1948, when a little-known local performer named John Lee Hooker entered United Sound Studios for his first recording session. Rock & roll was still an obscure rhythm & blues catchphrase, certainly not yet a musical genre, and Hooker's career trajectory had been that of the standard-issue bluesman. A native of the Mississippi Delta, he had drifted north for the same reason that eastern Europeans and Kentucky hillbillies, Greeks and Poles and Arabs and Asians and Mexicans had all been migrating toward Michigan in waves for the first half of the 20th Century. "The Motor City it was then, with the factories and everything, and the money was flowing," Hooker told biographer Charles Shaar Murray." All the cars were being built there. Detroit was the city then. Work, work, work, work. Plenty work, good wages, good money at that time."1 He worked many of those factories, Ford and General Motors among them, and at night he plied the craft of the bluesman in bars, social clubs and at house parties. But John Lee Hooker was no ordinary bluesman, and the song he cut at the tail of his first session, "Boogie Chillen," was no ordinary blues. Accompanied only by the stomp of his right foot, his acoustic guitar hammered an insistent pattern, partially based on boogie-woogie piano, that Hooker said he learned from his stepfather back in Mississippi as "country boogie." Informed by the urgency and relentless drive of his Detroit assembly line experiences, John Lee's urban guitar boogie would become a signature color on the rock & roll palette, as readily identifiable as Bo Diddley's beat or Chuck Berry's ringing chords. John Lee had another, more symbolic, influence on the rock & roll that followed, and more specifically the music of his adopted hometown. Then as now, the capital of the blues universe was Chicago. But John Lee's Detroit blues concedes nothing to the slaughterhouse brute 300 miles to the west. It trusts only the creative instinct of its creator, and the immediate experiences that shaped it. It needs nothing from the outside. When John Lee Hooker commanded the chillen of the Motor City to boogie, they knew exactly what to do. ----- Not long thereafter, Detroit's assembly line culture would provide Berry Gordy Jr. with a blueprint for building his own dream machines as Motown Records. Not long after that it would provide the emerging rock & roll scene with musical inspiration. But the stage was set, literally and figuratively, decades before. The parallel rise of Detroit as a work magnet and as an entertainment center is not coincidental. This city of hard work not only supported a plentitude of diversions for the off-hours, it demanded that its nighttime entertainers put out as much as the day laborers did. "There's an interesting bit in [humorist] Fred Allen's book Treadmill To Oblivion offers broadcaster Dave Dixon, who helped bring underground radio to Detroit in the late 60s over the airwaves of WABX-FM. "Allen's roots were in vaudeville. He says that throughout the vaudeville circuit in the early part of this century, Detroit was considered the toughest audience. If you made it in front of a Detroit crowd then you were safe on any stage in America. "These people will sit on their hands. I was at a concert recently where an artist--who will remain nameless--wanted to know why the room had failed to heat up for him. I had to explain that Detroit is a demanding audience. These people work hard for their money. When they pay $10 to see a show, they don't get excited until they've had ten dollars' worth. After they've gotten that, if you give them another dollar's worth they'll go nuts. And if you give them twelve dollars' worth they'll stand on their seats for the last half hour of the show. "But don't give them a $9.50 show and expect them to be impressed. This is Detroit. They know the difference." As vaudeville gave way to jazz and the big band era, Detroit developed a circuit of ballrooms to rival any metropolis in the land. These gilded palaces hosted furious battles of the bands, with competing jazz orchestras hurling sonic thunderbolts from opposite ends of the ballrooms. When jazz eventually shrank to the size of small bebop groups and retreated to the clubs, the ballrooms fell into disuse and disrepair, but this would be to the benefit of a future musical generation. Even before the advent of rock & roll, the Motor City audience was making its presence felt. Just as outsiders were drawn by factory work, so musicians from elsewhere began relocating to avail themselves of the plentiful musical possibilities. A young white pop singer from Oregon named Johnnie Ray became a major example of what Creem magazine publisher Barry Kramer would later term "the imported native": artists from elsewhere who found a spiritual home here and were pushed to become a better version of themselves by the welcoming but highly demanding Detroit audiences. The imported native would play an important part in the Motor City rock & roll revolution, attracting characters including Alice Cooper, Lester Bangs, George Clinton, and the author of this chapter. Johnnie Ray took up temporary Detroit residence in 1951 and honed his craft during an extended engagement at the Flame Show Bar, the city's premier rhythm & blues club. Performing in front of discerning black and tan crowds, he developed the aggressive, hyper-emotive vocal and performing style that would later lead him to be dubbed "The Prince of Wails." As Ray recalled, "When I started at the Flame, they told me, 'the louder you sing, boy, the better!'"3 When this wailing style was showcased in over-the-top ballads like "Cry" and "The Little White Cloud That Cried" it created a small sensation with the youngsters of the early 50s. It wasn't quite rock & roll--biographer Jonny Whiteside's description of Ray as "the missing link between Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley"4 is only slightly exaggerated--but Detroit was the perfect Petri dish in which to experiment with the combination of elements that would produce this pre-rock teen hysteria. His example points up the influence of rhythm & blues in the musical mash-up that became early rock & roll. Ray's first recordings for the Columbia Records blues subsidiary Okeh featured Maurice King & the Wolverines, the Flame Show Bar house orchestra. King and Wolverine Thomas "Beans" Bowles would later be recruited by Berry Gordy to help shape the musical bedrock of what we know as "the Motown Sound." Ray credits King and fellow Flame regular Little Miss Sharecropper (whom rock audiences would come to know and love as LaVern Baker, singer of "Tweedlee Dee" and "Jim Dandy") as his principal mentors in this melding of idioms. His debut single "Whiskey & Gin" was later described by Columbia A&R chief Mitch Miller as "the very first rock & roll record,"5 though notorious rock-hater Miller hardly qualifies as an expert in this area. The record was basically big band blues, but as a white singer working in an African-American idiom Johnnie Ray was clearly a pivotal figure. Nowhere was rock's R&B connection more pronounced than in Detroit. Racism has always been an unavoidable fact of American life, but other factors were working to bridge the great divide. The Motor City was a true melting pot, where people of all colors and creeds worked shoulder-to-shoulder on the assembly lines. Their children were therefore a bit less inclined to blindly accept the received racism that had been their legacy. The cracks in the facade may have been slight, but they were real. Especially when it came to music. Detroit was an R&B town, home to immortal singers like Jackie Wilson and Little Willie John. While most of the scenes remained segregated throughout the 50s--when Johnnie Ray performed at the Flame Show Bar he was the only white singer there--some bleedthrough was inevitable, and a shot of R&B attitude found its way into all the local musics. Detroit boasted a thriving polka scene centered in the Polish enclave called Hamtramck, and I'm sure that if you asked visiting bands, they'd tell you that those Motor City accordionists worked their squeezeboxes with an aggressive edge that struck fear in the hearts of out-of-towners. If what you feared in early rock & roll was what some saw as the blurring of racial barriers and the loosening of sexual mores, then this new music probably was as dangerous as they said. Nothing embodied this threat more provocatively than the records of Detroit R&B giant (and yet another refugee from the automotive plants) Hank Ballard. The vestments of church music had already been appropriated by Ray Charles to proclaim the pleasures of the flesh, but masked in metaphor just enough to slip past the sentries guarding the pop mainstream. Hank Ballard & the Midnighters made the carnal connection explicit in R&B hits like "Get It," "Sexy Ways," "Work With Me Annie" and, this being the 1950s, the inevitable denouement "Annie Had A Baby." These records had no hope of ever crossing over. Ballard would be responsible for the biggest dance fad of the early 60s with his song "The Twist," but it's easy to see why it took Chubby Checker's comparatively milquetoast reading to ignite the mania.